Kennedy John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy of Brookline, Massachusetts. John Kennedy, the second of nine children, attended Choate Academy (1932-1935), Princeton University (1935-36), Harvard College (1936-40), and Stanford Business School (1941). In 1940, he published a book based on his senior thesis entitled "Why England Slept." The book criticized British policy of Appeasement. In 1941, Kennedy enlisted in the Navy. In August 1943, Kennedy was commanding PT 109 near the Solomon Islands when it was run over a Japanese destroyer. Kennedy was awarded the Purple Heart, and it took the rest of the war for him to recover from his injuries and the malaria he contracted soon after his rescue. In 1945, Kennedy became a special writer for the Hearst press. In 1946, Kennedy was elected to the U.S. House of Representative. In 1952, he ran for and defeated Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., for the Senate. In 1954, he married Jacqueline Bouvier, and the couple had three children: Caroline, John Jr., and Patrick, who died as an infant. In 1956 he campaigned for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination but lost a close race to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. After Eisenhower's victory in 1956, Kennedy began to pursue the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. He won the nomination over Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson. With Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy faced Vice-president Richard M. Nixon in the general election. The campaign featured the first televised debate between presidential candidates. Kennedy became the youngest elected president in U.S. history at the age of forty-three, and the first to be born in the twentieth century. He was also the first Catholic to hold the nation's highest office. He was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
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